Welcome to the Institute for Advanced Studies

About the IAS

"Following a successful Mid-Term Review in 2008 and a Strategic Intervention by the Faculty of Social Sciences in 2010, and in recognition of the significance of the IAS as a hub for interdisciplinary research activities to the overall research mission of the University, Senate has approved the transfer of responsibilities for the direction and funding of the Institute for Advanced Studies from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Lancaster University Management School to the University. The Institute for Advanced Studies now reports to the University Research Committee and has an advisory board comprising Associate Deans for Research and university researchers with a strong track record of inter-disciplinary research."

Professor Bob Jessop, Founding Director

• About
• IAS people
• Mission Statement
• Organisational Structure
• International Partners
• Facilities/Room Bookings
• Find Us

Faculty Graduate School

Lancaster University prides itself on its interdisciplinarity. The Faculty Graduate School aims to promote this interdisciplinarity through the provision of a range of support, training and other activities specifically designed for our postgraduate community. These activities are designed to both support and go beyond that which is offered within those Departments that makeup the Faculty. Full details of all these activities are on the Faculty Graduate School website.

Grants and Funding

Our Incubation Programme provides seed-corn funding for interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary projects designed to encourage dialogue between local, regional and international academic and non-academic colleagues.

See also:

Incubation Programme Round 7

Previously Funded Projects

Research Activities

New ESRC funded seminar series: Cultural and Political Economy

more»

Search our Research Activities Database and Archive.

Experimentality

Experimentality was the 2009-10 Annual Research Programme of the Institute for Advanced Studies. It was a year-long collaborative exploration of ideas and practices of experimentation in science and technology, the arts, commerce, politics, popular culture, everyday life, and the natural world. Through a series of interdisciplinary workshops, arts events and a conference bringing together leading practitioners, academics and members of the wider public, it used the notion of the experiment to explore vital questions about the relationship between knowledge and power, freedom and control in the modern world. Programme Director, Bronislaw Szerszynski, says: ‘the idea of the experiment carries many of modernity’s greatest hopes - and greatest fears.  We need a concerted attempt to understand the nature of experimentation, in order to explore how we might use it to shape the future in more benign and inclusive ways’.

The programme launched with its first workshop, The Experimental Condition, on 15 and 16 October.  For further details, visit the programme’s website http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality

Annual Research
Programmes

Our Annual Research Programmes bring together international and national scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to work on a common research problem that is significant both intellectually and in terms of its implications for the real world.

Previous Programmes

2009-10 Experimentality

2007-08: New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living

2006-07 Regions and Regionalism in and beyond Europe

2005-06 The Knowledge-Based Economy